ARGENTINA
“The murder of six people, five of them women, in Argentina over the space of 48 hours has once again highlighted the problem of gender-related violence in the South American country, following a high-profile case last month involving the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl.”

Daniela

Born and raised in Mexico City, Daniela has finally decided to abdicate her post as an armchair skeptic and start doing some skeptical activism. She is currently living in Spain after having lived in the US, Brazil and Italy. You can also find her blogging in Spanish at esceptica.org.

The Toronto AA biz is truly bizarre. There are 51 listed atheist agnostic meetings every Sunday in the US. That’s the only day I tried counting, and only from a rather roughly kept national list.

This weekend, an international AA convention for ‘Atheists, Agnostics, Freethinkers and others’ is being held in Austin Texas. So how is it that a local ‘intergroup’ office in Toronto can unilaterally remove an AA group from its public schedule?

People don’t seem to grasp that, for good and ill, there is no central command structure of AA. This is good, in that no official standard can be enforced, no conformity demanded at the larger level. But there is also no protection against an individual group, or even a dominant personality within a group, imposing all sorts of weird restrictions and rules.

The notorious Pacific Group, in the LA area, has a dress code, and at least some of the time actually has segregated seating by gender. If you tell a 100 people in AA that this can even happen, 99 jaws will drop. But the driver behind that group wields so much influence that there are knockoff groups in the Northwest, New York, and Washington DC. The latter, ‘Midtown’ group hit the national media with a sex and money scandal a few years ago.

Advocating, or criticizing, AA is eerily difficult, since any accusation might be true of some place, and any warm-fuzzy promise that one member experiences be invalidated in the next town.

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The Skepchick Network is a collection of smart and often sarcastic blogs focused on science and critical thinking. The original site is Skepchick.org, founded by Rebecca Watson in 2005 to discuss women’s issues from a skeptical standpoint.